Liam Barr

There's news coming.
You don't know which way it goes.

Your shoulders are up near your ears.
They've been there since you heard.
You read the same paragraph three times.

Nothing has happened yet.
The flinch got here first.

Then it arrives and it's fine.
Or it isn't and you meet it already sore.

Either way you took it twice.
It only ever came once.

The news gets one hit.
The rest of it has been you.

An afternoon is enough to look like a different person.
The look lands before dinner.

The haircut. The setup.
The new way of describing yourself.
Everyone can see it.

The work underneath doesn't look like anything.
It takes months.
No one is in the room for any of it.

The look is always there for the taking.
It gets noticed and it asks almost nothing of you.

But it was finished the day it started.
Nothing about you moved.

The look was for them.
The work is the part that changes you.

You have the conversation in bed the night before.
You do their lines as well.

In there they take it well.
The right question at the right moment.
You fall asleep on that version.

You tell them in the morning.
They're looking for their keys while you say it.
They say good on you and mean it.

Something drops.
You'd been carrying a better script since midnight.
Nobody was ever going to match it.

They were working from nothing.
Which is the only honest way to do it.